


We're Rotting, You and I

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Family, Gamzee still believes in some sort of heaven, Humanstuck, I should've made that clear, Kurloz likes power, M/M, Mind Control, Mituna is just as much a GameBro as ever, Oh, Sort Of, Twisted love, Vampire AU, and also, except this is supposed to be an old-timey fantasy AU so they play cards and stuff ahaha, happy halloween month!, not exactly of course, some established romance, the Pyropes are kinda like the Winchesters in Supernatural, this is an attempt at pre-mysterious accident Mituna, vampire circus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-10-13
Packaged: 2019-01-10 06:41:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12293457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Kurloz Makara thought he had taken after his sire in all the ways that mattered.  It was in the jokes he told as his prey died twitching, pressed into his chest.  It was in the dark, chuckling magic that had made him his name.  No, he hadn’t grown soft and domestic, not even after so many dusty, blood-thick decades.  He hadn’t traded the godly terror and release of the hunt for anything, not the way Gamzee had.  Not for someone living to squeeze warmth back into his stiff, dead hands.So, when Kurloz met Mituna Captor, he didn’t believe he could grow to matter much at all.





	1. Ringmaster

**Author's Note:**

> Hey!! :D If you read this, I hope you enjoy it. Sorry for any mistakes I might've made, of course. 
> 
> (Also, I realized this is the 3rd time I've written about an undead Gamzee AU... Heh! So many ways to take the idea. :P)
> 
> Have a great day!!

Kurloz Makara thought he had taken after his sire in all the ways that mattered.  No, he hadn’t grown soft and domestic, not even after so many dusty, blood-thick decades.  He hadn’t traded the godly terror and release of the hunt for anything, not the way his sire had.  Not for someone living to squeeze warmth back into his stiff, dead hands. 

Gamzee had never wanted to die without dying, to become so heartbreakingly thirsty.  He’d told Kurloz as much when he was still young, practically from the first moment he’d woken up as an undead accident.  When Kurloz had to be taught to feed and to bury himself away from the daylight, Gamzee shuffled his feet and tried to make it into a game, as if he were helping out a child.  When Kurloz had to be reminded to wear soft, understanding smiles and sink into the shadow at the edges of the street, Gamzee laughed all rattly in his long-dead, clotted throat and apologized.  You can’t walk in the bright ways, the middle ways, brother.  Not anymore.

Gamzee had expected Kurloz to hate him for making him into that new creature, that new thing that would never really belong anywhere.  Even when Kurloz explained that he had been a skeleton of a man, before.  Even when he tried to explain _why_ he’d had his mouth sewn shut when Gamzee stumbled across him way back when.  Who he’d had to hurt, to get stitched up that way.

It was as if Kurloz was supposed to want a pulse more than a purpose.

 _“You got to tell me the truth of it, motherfucker,”_ Gamzee had said, voice heavy and dripping with all his years, with all the poisons he took to forget and grow hazy.  To not feel his own hands snap bones and stretch skin apart like peeling into a juice-splattering fruit.  _“I’d feel better, if you said you hated me.”_

 _“Not at all,”_ Kurloz had told him.  And then, _“Shh.”_  

When the human Karkat said fuck it – said he had better not come to regret this, you ridiculous undead asshole – and offered Gamzee a basement, offered him soft lips on his forehead, he went.  He went as if it was to that afterlife he wouldn’t stop rambling on about.  But Kurloz had not gone with him. 

No, no.  Kurloz was sure he would never be that side of Gamzee, but he _was_ the knowing smiles, the jokes victims heard in a throaty murmur just before they finally died.  He was tendrils threading themselves deep, deep into a motherfucker’s mind, like some kind of awful, poisoned roots.  He had learned those things from his sire, and they _mattered_.  He was the traveling circus both he and Gamzee had run, before, and he was the grave dirt ground into the boards of their train.  He was all that it meant to live beyond death, beyond life – whatever Gamzee had ever known of that horror-story freedom, and plenty someone like him would never have wanted to find out without a little _encouragement_. 

So, when Kurloz met Mituna Captor, he didn’t believe he could grow to matter much at all.

Mituna was just another lost and aching human willing to climb on to a circus train that creaked like a scream, after all, that rattled into town with spider webs stitched between its boards like glue.   He hadn’t brushed the train off to turn back to his ordinary life, and he didn’t go see the show, either.  Mituna just climbed right in when the train wheezed to a stop, and ducked from car to car until he found someone he could talk to about a job.  The paintings along the circus train’s cars were fading, now that Gamzee was gone and didn’t smear them on just as tenderly as his own clown paint anymore.  The balloons trailing out its windows were limp and bobbing along, almost out of helium.  They looked like half-hearted compliments, like mistakes someone forgot to drag back into the train.  But Mituna didn’t stop and question.  He said, “I have to get out of here” to as many pie-splattered clowns and sweat soaked strongmen as it took.  He finally made his way to the back, to Kurloz’s car, and Kurloz said sure.

Sure, they always had room for the desperate with _his_ circus.

And Mituna wasn’t anything else, at first.  Just desperation and crooked teeth, with his lips twisting into all kinds of snide and snickering smiles around them.  He only had to leave that town behind, with the Empress Baked Goods factory right in the middle, with the promise of some awful future Kurloz didn’t really care about hovering over him.  Mituna was put to work helping to set up and take down all the tents, first.  Then shoveling up after the animals, then arranging Kurloz’s twisting mirrors, his freak shows and carnival games…  All that.  The beginner’s jobs, until – maybe – Kurloz thought he would climb off the train just the way he climbed on and try disappearing into the night. 

And then Kurloz would catch Mituna, brother.  And then he would drink him dry in some brown, waterless field, under a moon as frail and far away as forgiveness.

But Mituna stayed on the train, and he kept with the circus.  Sometimes he got cocky and shoved all his secrets off him, as if night had fallen and he could finally crawl out from underneath his own grave dirt.  He did tricks with the materials as he set up, then.  He showed off, daredevil-ing from the top of the train and stuff like that, taunting other workers, challenging them to card games so Kurloz would hear him laughing late at night.  There was something shivering and electric about him, then.  So much pent-up energy.  So much thundering blood.  He flirted and crowed, and he outwitted Cronus the freak show merman so many times that he tried to climb out of his tank and gag him with some prop seaweed.

Kurloz wanted that electricity.  His own veins were so sluggishly still.          

“Why would the big boss want to see me?” Mituna snorted, the first time Kurloz called him back to the last train car, to the one with the coffin in it tucked under lots of satiny expensive blankets and dripping, hardened candle wax.  “I’ve done all my fucking work!  Faster than most of you losers, too.”

“Sure, Mituna,” said one of the clowns Gamzee had hired.  The Makara Family Circus had been half-Gamzee, half-Kurloz for the longest time, and the slapstick clowns still paraded around and smashed pies in their faces, wobbled high up on unicycles so tall they couldn’t reach the pedals.  Kurloz’s secret tents would stand long after all the clowns drifted away, though, he felt sure.  “But he’s called you anyway, so you better go.”

“That’s stupid,” Mituna declared.  He said it in such a swaggering way, arms crossed over his brittle chest.  But he went, of course.

And by the time Mituna made his way to the ringmaster’s cabin, Kurloz found he could not drink from him.  Even when Mituna’s warmth was so close and Kurloz could hear him like buzzing radio static, taste like him like a memory that was only barely forgotten, still on the tip of his tongue.  Even then.  Mituna stared Kurloz openly in his face, by that point, and sat across from him.  He shuffled a deck of cards between long fingers with thick knuckles, knobby as dice shoved under his skin.  Mituna liked his games. 

He asked if Kurloz was dissatisfied with his work, and Kurloz said no.  He asked if Kurloz regretted bringing him onboard – if something he’d said during one of his bitter patches had ruffled people’s feathers too much.  Mituna shifted like phases of the moon, honestly, sometimes all broad, taunting smiles and sometimes nothing but doom and bruised-raw nerves, snapping at every little thing.  Kurloz said no, again.

This was normally the part where Kurloz would have reached out and grabbed at Mituna’s mind, like a cat snatching a bird out of the sky.  This was the sort of man that would put up a fight, surely.  This was the sort of man that would lash out, screaming, attacking, his thoughts all lightning and pain that Kurloz still didn’t know.  But that he’d know soon enough, brother, once he stroked Mituna’s mind down into something tender, something that would sway for him and tilt his throat way back.  Offered up like a sacrifice, like spread palms.  Like what Kurloz imagined love must have been like.

Normally, none of that would have been a problem.  Kurloz was good at leading people down his dark, winding paths – he was good at drawing them close, and wrestling them down, and stealing whatever life he needed from inside them.  There it was again: what he had learned from his sire, before Gamzee fell into a crumpled mess in the human Karkat’s arms, begging to be released, to be forgiven.  Begging for what Karkat couldn’t give him, though he could definitely pat his hair down and mutter at him in a soft, gruff voice.

But Kurloz couldn’t quite reach his sire’s gifts, just then, in his cabin with the candles rattling on their stands as the circus train rode on and on.  Kurloz would kill in the city they were coming to, he knew – it was a big city, and people went missing all the time.  He tried to focus on that hunger, on the anonymous alleys that would smell like rot whether he walked them or not.  But still, he watched Mituna carefully and could not reach for him.

“Well, boss man, I have no idea what you want from me,” Mituna declared, obviously trying to keep his voice civil.  That got harder and harder for Mituna, the longer he hung around Kurloz’s circus.  The farther away they got from the Empress CEO and her baked goods dominion, really.  He was like a boulder rolling down a hill, sometimes, crunching off bits of the mountain as he fell.  Taking people with him, into whatever kind of emotion he was feeling.  Without any undead magic; without even trying.  “You wanna play cards, or something?”

And then Kurloz said yes.  Yes, he would play cards. 

“Don’t expect me to lose to you just because you cut my checks,” Mituna laughed, dealing out hands for a game Kurloz didn’t know.  “Now, I’ll walk you through this.  Just listen, I guess.”  And then he added on as an afterthought, “Sir.”

Kurloz smiled, and waited.  He played with the scars that pressed up against his teeth, from where his lips had been sewn shut so, so long ago.  He couldn’t collect scars, anymore.  The dead came in all sorts of shades, of course, from hauntings that rattled the floorboards to those that would slit your throat if you slept beneath certain stars.  From shambling, dripping meat to porcelain.  Kurloz was the sort of dead thing that looked very still, and like he was made of wax.  Some sort of hollow doll, filled up and then drained, filled up and then drained.  He listened, and he played just as Mituna said, and after this man like lightning – this man like life, like suddenness, like remembering – came back to his ringmaster’s car a lot, a lot of times, he finally won a match.

They had spoken together, by that point, about so many things.

Each time Mituna sauntered to the back of the train, with stories about Cronus from the freak show getting his tail stuck in a fancy fish tank castle they’d gotten him, or about Damara who danced on ribbons during one of Kurloz’s more artistic, dreamlike performance slots finally snapping and cutting her cheating boyfriend out of her life, Kurloz thought maybe then he would drink him dry.  He imagined tilting Mituna’s neck back, waiting for him to shudder, like falling in his bones.  Waiting for his eyes to flutter closed.  But he didn’t do a fucking thing.

Kurloz listened.  After a while, he started telling Mituna stories of his own, in a sing-song, spinning carousel voice he’d learned by watching his sire.  Gamzee did it differently, of course.  Gamzee didn’t purr so self-contentedly, and he wouldn’t have known some of the stories Kurloz told. 

Where had Kurloz been born?  It was almost hard to remember.  What sort of foods did he like?  Aside from life, raw life, spilling over his cold skin and making him hallucinate heartbeats…   Mm.  It took a moment, but then he remembered sweetness, and meat that was almost still bleeding.  What had Kurloz been like as a child?  Oh, that was easy – he’d loved riddles, and secrets, and would have talked for hours and hours to someone willing to listen.  He’d lost the need to talk so much, now that he had secrets honestly worth keeping.

Had Kurloz ever loved anyone? 

Well, now.  It would’ve been so, so long ago, wouldn’t it have been?

Mituna told Kurloz what he was running from, in pieces, haltingly.   Some of his walls had come down just then, and Kurloz could feel that his mind was like a bruise all over.  It would have been very easy to take him.  But instead, Kurloz told Mituna that he would have a safe space there, on his circus train, watching the show from between the flaps in one of Gamzee’s gaudy, hopeful tents.  As long as he needed it. 

It was a strange thing, but Kurloz honestly meant it when he said Mituna would have a safe space with him.  He imagined the man growing old, for a moment, as he watched and said nothing more.  He imagined burying Mituna by the side of the road, in a secret place only he would ever know.  He imagined this fiery, laughing, teasing man, so often tumbling over his own tongue and saying things he’d beat himself up for later…  Only _his_ , in a way.  Not the way those poor, empty husks whose minds he got all tangled up in were his.  No.  His in a way more like friendship.  More like what he and Gamzee could have been, when they were still pretending to be family.               

When Mituna asked, point blank, whether Kurloz had been feeding off of people along their show’s charted path, Kurloz almost wanted to say yes.  He shook his head, instead, though, and smiled wider.  He kept his hands folded, still as any other unliving thing, in front of him on the table.

“Some of the clowns already knew,” Mituna confessed.  “They warned me.  Said that’s why the other ringmaster – the one I didn’t meet, right? – was always high out of his mind.”

Kurloz kept very still.

"At first I didn’t believe it.  It’s…  Fucking crazy, right?”

Kurloz nodded, raising his eyebrows underneath his skeletal clown paint.  He had dressed the part, that night, because he’d wandered the freak show as it kept open late.  He’d folded his arms behind his back, and watched the acts he’d scripted, and gotten accidentally splashed by Cronus the merman.

“But then I started checking out old newspapers, when we’d circle back around to places?  I’ve been here a long time, now that I think about it.  And there are always bodies found, Kurloz.  Sooner or later.  I’m not an idiot.”

“No, you’re not,” Kurloz agreed. 

 “Or, you know?” Mituna barked a laugh.  “ _Maybe I am!_  Because I’m about to say, ‘Hey, drink my fucking blood, okay?’  Not enough to kill me.  But if you have a little at a time – and more often –  maybe you won’t have to kill at all.  Fuck it.  Oh, God.  Fuck it, I came back here tonight to ask if that would work.  If maybe you don’t want to be a monster anymore.”

Kurloz liked that Mituna had called him a monster.  It was as if he’d finally seen him, truly seen him.  Certainly he didn’t see that Kurloz had always _liked_ being a monster, but maybe that was something he didn’t need to know.       

When Kurloz held Mituna still, all that energy wrapped up tight in arms like lead, like death, like a puppet when the strings were dropped, he felt dirtier than he ever had before.  This man was taking one for the team, as he put it.  A little of his blood, for a stranger’s life.  A little of his time, to ask a monster what he dreamt about.  Mituna brushed his lips against Kurloz’s cheek and offered up his wrist.  He didn’t want Kurloz to drink from his neck, he said.  He wanted to watch it happening.

“Just do it, before I change my mind and start looking up exorcists or some shit,” Mituna said, softly.  It almost reminded Kurloz of a declaration of love.

Kurloz drank, and felt more alive than he had even when he had been truly living.  He’d never had blood given freely, before.  Even his sire’s human, Karkat, brought him blood home from the hospital in jugs and bags and twining tubes, like curly straws.

Maybe Kurloz didn’t notice, as Mituna faded.  It happened slowly, after all.  But it happened.  His words became so much less biting – he didn’t posture or pick fights, anymore, and sometimes he tipped forward during their card games and ended up with his head cradled in his arms, more deeply asleep than was really natural.  Dead to the world. 

Honestly, maybe Kurloz didn’t want to notice.

 He was telling most of the stories, by that point – reminding Mituna of what the hunt had been like, and, of course, before it all, how he was changed.   He’d lashed out, scratching at Gamzee’s cheek, at his eyes, at his face, even as his sire was pulling away.  _“Got enough blood to last me, motherfucker.  Just breathe, and lie quiet, and I’ll see if I can get someone to come by and see you.”_ Gamzee’d said all that, but Kurloz had been bitten and pressed against the brick wall of some church.  Gamzee had held him as if he was hugging a close friend, and just after he’d bitten in deep he went limp against Kurloz’s shoulder for a moment.  Savoring it, as if they knew each other.  And that was unacceptable. 

Kurloz stretched his own mouth-stitches wide and then wider, and he’d bitten Gamzee back.  It was rage, he said.  It was knowing.  It was always meant to happen just that way.

Mituna didn’t answer, when Kurloz talked like that.  He was ashen, his skin getting dusty and colder.  Some days he could barely open his eyes. Kurloz drank from his wrists, and his throat, and all up his long sinewy arms. 

 When the hunters came, it was almost a mercy.  Even Kurloz could see it, by the time they lifted Mituna up in their arms.  They were twins, like two sides of a balancing scale.  They were shattering glass and vampires strung up by the neck to cook in the sun, to bubble and spit and crumble down into ash until only the rope was left.  They were the Pyropes, practically a legend.  When Mituna was limp in one of their arms, resting his head against her shoulder like a child, Kurloz realized he could see all those jabbing, beautiful bones trying to reach out from inside him.  Mituna’s skin had become like plastic stretching thin in the heat.

 Kurloz’s insides twisted in a way he barely knew.  An almost human way.  He hadn’t realized it was so bad, before then, he told himself.  Or he had decided not to see.

 He remembered how he had imagined cracking jokes with an old-man Mituna, a Mituna still electric and sharp all the way until Kurloz buried him in that secret, gentle place. 

Yes, it was probably for the best that the Pyropes came, flipping a coin to see if they should herd all the clowns out and burn the circus train. 

They didn’t. 

They _did_ elect a new ringmaster, and scrawl protective sigils in chalk all over Gamzee’s goofy, whimsical paintings.  They tossed their glossy hair, glinting like an oil slick over their shoulders.  They chased Kurloz into a strange night, with only a little of his grave dirt shoved into his pockets.  Only a little bit of darkness left to hide in, until he’d have to duck out of the sun.  He glanced back to Mituna only once, and saw one of the Pyrope sisters had balanced her red-tinted glasses on over his closed-tight eyes.

Kurloz twisted himself up into a crooked and smiling goat, and he gave himself back to his hunting, to the kind of monster he had been before Mituna came on board his circus train.       

Except, not completely.  Except, something as deep and vital as his own still, rotten-fruit heart had changed.   


	2. Daredevil

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Friday the 13th, everybody!! :O I hope you enjoy the story. Thanks for reading!!!

Mituna Captor had been betting on himself for so long.   Even through the gnawing wrongness he felt too much of the time, the sense of doom that had followed him away from the Empress Baked Goods factory and what its CEO had done to his friends back home.  He’d been betting on himself long enough that it had felt natural to think the ringmaster could have really loved him, and that maybe by letting Kurloz close and loving him back despite everything Mituna would actually be able to save anyone at all.

That was all his friend Kankri had tried to do back at the factory, he’d reminded himself.  That was what Mituna had been taught heroes would try to do, the people they’d tell stories about.  It was where he figured he had to roll his dice.

 And that had really fucking worked out for him, huh?    

Mituna woke from what felt like a long, swaying dream – but that he knew had actually been his past few months – and found himself in a hotel room.  The air smelled like clean laundry and greasy food, and when he managed to creak his head a little to the side he saw the Pyrope sisters sitting cross-legged on the second twin bed, surrounded by papers.  They knew so many inside jokes and fantastical tricks, those hunters.  He had heard of them, of course.  He recognized them from the sign – Libra, balance – they wore like a promise around their necks. 

One of the sisters…  Terezi, Mituna thought…  Had been blinded by a vampire in her childhood. Or so the legend went.  One of the spidery undead, people said it was, with too many eyes and spindly limbs with an uncomfortable number of joints in them.  She had carved out a lot of dark tunnels under the Pyropes’ hometown.  Some people said the vampire who blinded Terezi had been a monster right from the start, but the rumor Mituna thought was most interesting went that she had once been her best friend in all the world. 

The first thing Mituna managed to think through coherently, seeing the Pyrope sisters scribbling on a map and snickering with their heads pressed all close together, was that if hunters like these ones had come for Kurloz he kind of had to be dead.  Or, you know, _truly_ dead, not just hollow inside.  He would be the sort of sleeping, now, that meant heaven or hell or nothingness, whatever helped you get through the day.

The Pyropes had a tube stuck into Mituna’s veins, and they were giving him back some of his life.  He watched the liquid trickle down and down and into himself, and he thought about the solidity of Kurloz’s grip.  The somber, cemetery-still way he stood, too, like one of those angel statues with beatific smiles and folded hands.  Honestly, Mituna was wondering if Kurloz had meant to kill him.  Maybe he’d expected to wear him out like a battery, sooner or later, so their arrangement would have only lasted as long as Mituna’s own flimsy skin.

He wondered whether Kurloz had cared about him as much as he’d thought he did, though not in so many words. 

Being around Kurloz had made Mituna feel steadier, inside, as if he could truly be in control of his own self.  His words, his moods, his twitching, panicked memories.  The guy had just treated him like he was so _interesting_.  Making Kurloz laugh, cracking that stern mausoleum face wide open like a blasphemy, had felt like nailing some kind of stunt just right.  It had been defying chance.  It had been a winning hand every time.

And sometimes, sometimes even if not all that often, Kurloz looked almost human.  Old and sad and not so cryptically beautiful.  It had been Mituna’s turn to be gentle, then, in a way he wasn’t used to being gentle. 

Ah, but there were the Pyrope sisters, who knew all the flashiest spells and never let a troublemaking vampire die easy when they could hang them out to face the sun. 

Kurloz wouldn’t be mapping out any of his artsy, philosophical clown routines, anymore, then, would he?  He couldn’t offer anyone else a safe space – despite what he was, despite everything – not ever again.

“Oh, hey,” said one of the Pyrope sisters, shifting forward so the bed creaked – so she could see Mituna’s eyes all bleary and open and burning like he’d just gone days without sleep.  It was the one with the softer voice.  Latula.  “He’s awake.”

“About time,” Terezi crowed.  “Now we can hunt that sucker down and finish this.  You wanna grill this guy for leads first, or me?”

 _That sucker_ was Kurloz, Mituna knew it.  And that meant he’d wiggled away, somehow, and gone from his velvety train car office to waiting out the day in a shallow grave along the side of a road.  Maybe Mituna shouldn’t have worried for him, just then.  Maybe he shouldn’t have remembered how he’d offered his own wrists up, and how shy Kurloz had seemed first wrapping those dead-weight arms around him.

Sure, he was angry.  Mituna had brushed close to death before, but never while being held by someone who whispered that he needed him, that he wanted him to come by more often, that he loved the way he told people off and wouldn’t take shit from anyone else in that circus troupe.  Never like _this_.  Whenever Mituna had imagined love, before, it had been a raucous laughing thing, full of contests, full of sparking light and that kind of feeling like he was falling from high, high up.  Kurloz was something different, but for a while Mituna had really thought they could bring out better things in each other.

Maybe he’d been right, to a point.  Or maybe he’d just been feeling really alone.  Honestly, the difference didn’t matter all that much to him, right then.

The Pyrope sisters were gentler than Mituna had expected.  They smoothed holy water over his eyes, and drew sigils on his neck and wrists to make the raw meat there stop bleeding.  They told him that it wasn’t his fault, and that a monster so ancient and hungry as Kurloz Makara could grab hold of all sorts of minds.  Could have drawn anyone to him, even a hunter like them if they weren’t careful. 

Mituna confessed he didn’t think that’s what had happened.  He’d never felt dragged beyond his will, not really.  He’d felt close, and then closer, and then he’d offered up his blood.

Latula said, “Oh, honey,” and Terezi said, “Ew.”

They flipped a coin to decide what to investigate first – the city where Kurloz had died-but-not-died, or the buried undead community under the desert the Makara Family Circus train had been rattling through not too long ago.  Mituna traveled with them, when he could stand and gather enough strength to carry their bags.  First, he only waited back in hideouts and hotel rooms, pacing and scratching at the scars on his neck, rattling around like a marble in a can.  Then, they started taking him along as a lookout, sometimes, pressing a zapping electric spell book into his hands and telling him to bring lightning for them if they needed it.  Really, they only did that last part because he asked.  Or, whined.  Okay, fine: they only fixed up that lookout lightning thing because Mituna whined to be valuable.  To be part of the game.

More often than not, Terezi just piled a bunch of death records related to other cases she and her sister were working down on the bed next to him, or dragged in stained, incense-cloudy folklore tomes so she could blow the dust in his face before handing them over.  She said reading through everything and taking notes for them _was_ useful, and Mituna said some angry things he probably shouldn’t have.  She just laughed, though.  Terezi was often just laughing.

Mituna felt cut off from the world, in a way, even with how Latula looked at him sometimes.  When he was showing off, maybe, or wrapped up in the kind of ridiculous story that could help him forget where he was and what he was doing.  It was like her eyes were going all melty, and she was thinking about offering him a stupidly painful high-five.  Sometimes, Mituna thought that if he allowed himself to get closer to her, Latula might have been the kind of love he’d imagined when he was younger.  He wouldn’t have been able to appreciate her then, he didn’t think, if she’d just been some girl with very clean teeth who would fuck you up if you even looked at her sister funny.  But now, after Kurloz had held him, knowing Kurloz was either going to kill again or die, impressing Latula felt like something so clean.  Something Mituna wasn’t sure he deserved.

They waded through frozen rivers to whisper the drowned dead up from between the stones, solving mysteries Mituna only half understood.  They crashed vampiric balls in underworld cathedrals, with stained glass lit up all flickering and alive in the torchlight.  With stalactites dripping ancient cave water down into goblets full of still-warm blood.  They questioned the undead about Kurloz, and Mituna wished people didn’t keep mentioning his sense of humor, or his falling out with his sire, or how he’d never been able to settle down with anyone for long.  Sweet things.  Human things.  They stood for a while in a couple alleys where Kurloz might have first been bitten, and they were all so awful Mituna had to seriously consider why Kurloz would have had to sleep huddled down in any of them.

Mituna wished he could move on easily, becoming part of this new life.  He wished he could spend his nights lying awake thinking about the way Latula laughed as she fought her way out of vampire nests, with moss-dripping chandeliers reflected off her red sunglasses.  The way she swished her hips, and beat the shit out of people who wanted to kill her like she was actually dancing.

After a while, Latula flopped down next to Mituna as he was thumbing through one of Terezi’s creepy books and said, “So, Kurloz Makara’s sire.  Do you think it’s time you told me more about him?”

And Mituna said, “Sure, I guess.”  He trusted her, by that point, like he wasn’t sure he would ever be able to trust Kurloz no matter how much he wanted to.  

“Do you think it’s time we go and visit the guy?  Say hey, see what’s up?”

“Heh.  Why not, I guess?  Kurloz says he went soft.”

Latula tried to make it look like she wasn’t weirded out by Mituna casually quoting the vampire who had nearly drained him to a husk, but she didn’t do a very good job of it.                

Even considering the vague, kind of contradictory idea of a vampire gone “soft,” Mituna was surprised by how mundane Kurloz’s sire’s home turned out to be.  There was a garden outside, overgrown with weeds and swollen berries.  There was a muddy foot mat in front of the door, so worn the writing had faded away.  The curtains were thick enough to block out all light, but they were a loud, defiant red, too.  Not really trying to hide at all.

A short man with ruffled hair and a scuffed grey wedding band on opened the door just the tiniest bit when Mituna knocked.  They had dropped by around sunset, but the man was holding what smelled like hot, ready-made coffee. 

“What can I do for—?” he started, looking Mituna up and down.  But then he saw the Pyropes behind him, waving cheekily from the porch steps, and he slammed the door hard.

It took a lot of wheedling to get Karkat Vantas to open the door, again.  Terezi announcing that Mituna was “That asshole Kurloz’s boyfriend” was what did it, in the end.  Karkat leaned out, snorting a baffled laugh.  He said, “Really?  Shit.  You have pretty awful taste, don’t you?” 

Mituna tried to think of some witty, condescending response, but the scars on his neck still ached and his bones had been so, so heavy lately.  Almost too much to carry, sometimes.  All he could manage was a curled up lip and a little shrug. 

“He almost died,” said Latula.  “We’d like to speak with Gamzee.”

“Weapons by the door. All of them,” said Karkat, after pausing for just a moment and swallowing hard.  “Scrub off all your fucking sigils, too, where I can see you.  And then, I guess…  Coffee?”

Gamzee was still mostly dead, when they settled themselves in the living room.  There were romance novels piled on the coffee table, and a set of battered, ancient-looking juggling clubs hung on the wall like trophies.  Karkat brought a half-eaten loaf of crumbling sweet bread drizzled in icing out of the kitchen and announced, “It’s not mine: Gamzee likes to bake stuff he knows he can’t eat.”

Mituna thought, for just a second, about the Empress Baked Goods factory, and looked away.  It was strange to see Latula without sigils for speed and flexibility painted up her arms.  But she smiled at him anyway, familiar as the first few notes of a favorite song, by then.

Terezi teased Karkat about his old man sweater, and Karkat told her about just how rude it was that she’d put her feet up on his coffee table.  When the infamous vampire Gamzee Makara made it up the stairs, he was wearing pajamas all crusty from lying in grave dirt.  He looked like Kurloz in some jarring ways – in his soft, dizzy curls, maybe, and how both their lips were always kind of naturally curled up at the edges.  In the disarming stillness that came over him when he thought no one was looking, too.  But Gamzee slouched, like the kind of statue not too many people were likely to carve.  His eyes seemed so heavy and tired, like stones dropped in deep water and always sinking.  There was a little blood smeared at the edge of his lip, like he’d had something to drink really quickly before coming upstairs.

Maybe it was a testimony to how much he trusted Karkat that Gamzee only shuffled forward and drawled, “Don’t usually get company.  Everything good?”  It was like he didn’t think he had to be suspicious, if Karkat wasn’t.  Like he knew no one could have come inside so easily if there wasn’t a decent reason.

Karkat stood on his tip-toes to swipe the blood off Gamzee’s lip with his thumb.  He didn’t seem so grossed out as Mituna would have expected, given that Gamzee chose to drink by himself in the dark.  Maybe this particular vampire did that for himself, though.  Like there were sides of him he didn’t want Karkat to think about too much, even if he _was_ wearing a matching grey wedding band. 

Gamzee was softer than Kurloz, without so many sharp bones.  He moved in a floppy, careful way, making sure not to brush up against Terezi’s legs as he took a seat. 

“They’re here about Kurloz,” Karkat said.

“Aw, fuck,” said Gamzee. 

Now, Mituna had heard Kurloz talk about Gamzee as his sire plenty of times.  Gamzee had taught Kurloz to survive, and to work a dark, chuckling magic that wouldn’t really have had a place in the kind of house with pajama sets and photo albums in it.  He had shown him all the ways Kurloz knew he had been blessed.  Freed.  A second life, full of risk and reward, full of thrill and opportunities.  Something sacred and secret that had saved Kurloz from whatever it was he’d been before.

Kurloz had talked about riding that circus train with Gamzee as equals, as family.  Proud of his sire, and sure that they were just two sides of the same spinning coin.

It was hard for Mituna to think about coins without remembering Latula, lately.  The way she and Terezi carried coins in their gloves, warm and sweaty against their palms and ready for flipping.  He met her eyes again and she clicked her smile back on, probably as encouragingly as she could.

Honestly, though, Mituna hadn’t really thought much about how the Kurloz and Gamzee story would sound from someone else’s perspective.  Karkat talked about Kurloz as a brooding creature, someone upset by change, who had lashed out at him.  Tried to erase him so his sire couldn’t move on.  Gamzee talked about Kurloz as a romantic, who had crossed a line that couldn’t be uncrossed…  But who had lost more than he, Gamzee, had ever really come to understand.

When Mituna described what had happened to him, Karkat said, “Yeah, that _is_ weird for Kurloz.  He just talked to you, for ages?  And you weren’t even saying anything interesting?”

Just stories, yeah.  Just life.  Mituna’s own life, as mundane as setting up carnival game stands and plopping goldfish in little cups for kids to win.  As mundane as finding someone to lean on.  Mituna had thought it was interesting enough, at the time.

When Latula asked for some of Gamzee’s blood to track Kurloz with, Karkat answered “Oh my God.  _No fucking way!_ ” before Gamzee could even open his mouth.

“I know the kind of spells you hunters learn,” he spat.  “I don’t want to wake up and find him splattered all over our fucking basement.”

Gamzee rubbed Karkat’s shoulder, then – a little comfort in waxy, undead skin.  Mituna noticed some silver shot in Karkat’s dark hair, bright in the lamplight.  Only a little, for now.  “If I find that motherfucker for you, are you gonna try and kill him?”

“Yes,” said Terezi, without hesitation.

Mituna waited a beat, to see if he could get away with saying nothing.  But then he was tumbling forward, like all those times he had been balanced on the edge of something and decided to see if he could land on his feet.  “There are less shitty vampires,” he said.  “You talk a lot about a ‘Mother Maryam.’  Isn’t she, like, some kind of hunter saint?”

“There are different kinds of undead, sure,” said Karkat, shifting forward and suddenly staring Mituna straight in the eyes.  “But there are also just different kinds of people.  Kurloz tried to kill me.  And he almost killed you.  Do you really think he’s the kind of guy who could be satisfied by _anything_?”

“Maybe,” said Mituna.

“You keep an eye on this idiot,” Karkat told the Pyrope sisters, and Latula nodded, chewing on her lip.  “Goddammit.  Gamzee, you better help them out, I guess.  Maybe they’ll even try to take him in alive, if you throw in a couple pointers – give him to their precious ‘Mother Maryam,” or something.”

“I mean, we could try,” said Latula.  “We can always try out new tricks.”

“Gamzee’s afraid it will be his fault if Kurloz goes to hell,” Karkat clarified.  “He’s still kind of hoping he’ll turn over a new leaf, and someone will be willing to pour holy oil on his head or some shit.”

“Stranger things have happened,” said Gamzee, looking at Karkat with a kind of wanting tenderness that made Mituna uncomfortable.  It was so sticky, like candy caught between his teeth.

Gamzee shuffled downstairs pretty soon after that, and came back with some of his blood on a map he’d torn out of one of Karkat’s atlases.  Karkat was less than thrilled about that part, but Terezi clapped Gamzee on the arm, said they might as well get going. 

Kurloz was in a nondescript town Mituna had never heard of.  It had probably seemed like a good place to hide because he’d have had no reason to choose that particular place over any other.  Not a lot of people to feed off, even.  Just dust and dead flowers, and restaurants without names.  He was moving through, sure, but probably to another empty spot just like that one. 

When the Pyrope sisters made it to that creaking, sad little space, they came in disguise.  They traded their signature red glasses for something simpler, and tucked their Libra pendants into their shirts.  Latula folded all her slick-straight, shiny hair into a hat, and Mituna was surprised how much he missed watching it shift as she moved.  After they checked into the town’s inn – probably just somebody’s house opened up and filled with creaking beds meant for strangers – Terezi had to tend to her eyes.  Every now and then, the venom her spidery vampire friend from back home had used on her flared up, again.  Her eyes went from dull red scabs to bleeding, screaming things.  It sucked in a way Mituna didn’t really want to think about.  Terezi had been dabbing under her glasses with a cloth for too much of their traveling time.

Latula smoothed her sister’s hair, and talked in a peppy, jumping voice, trying to be a distraction.  She talked about stuff from when they were little.  Stuff Mituna would probably have wanted to know about, if he hadn’t been so sure he should gamble on himself one more time.  He didn’t think of it as gambling on Kurloz, too.  Not yet.   

Mituna should have savored it more, those last few minutes he spent pacing their drafty inn room, the floorboards squeaking beneath him.  He should have savored the way Latula talked with her hands, so much movement where Kurloz was always waxen stillness.  Always smiling so knowingly, even in his memories...  Even knowing everything he’d learned by that point, after seeing so many of the other struggling dead.  Mituna should have savored the way Terezi could snicker, even with her eyes oozing congealed venom, even trying to write out painkiller spells all over her skin.  He should have really thought about what those hunters could have meant for him.

It could have been Mituna had a family, there, without complications or questions or anything left to prove.  But he’d been trying to prove himself to the world as long as he could remember.  Since the Empress Baked Goods factory, sure, but for a long time before that, too. 

“I’m gonna go grab something for us to eat,” Mituna said, and it didn’t feel practiced at all.  At least, he didn’t think so.  Latula blew him a kiss and grinned from behind a stranger’s glasses.  Terezi just said he should get some kind of cherry candy, thanks.  Maybe a lot of cherry candy.

They trusted him.  That’s what Mituna took away from the Pyrope sisters, as he threw himself down the stairs and out into the evening.  They didn’t think he could have been lying until it was too late. 

He went looking for Kurloz, of course.  Looking for disturbed dirt, or alleyways with too many cobblestones pried up.  He peered into sewer grates, and figured he would look a lot less like a vindictive, justice-bringing hunter all by himself.  There was a swing in Mituna’s step that he remembered from back before he lost his friend Kankri, before he’d joined up with Kurloz’s circus at all.  He had his book of lightning magic that the Pyropes had given him in the bag tossed over his shoulder. 

Maybe Mituna should have known Kurloz would be the one to find him, in the end.  He was balanced up on somebody’s fenceposts and scanning the empty brambles of their yard when Kurloz rounded a corner and stood staring up at him.  Head tilted just a little to the side, hands limp in a coat Mituna knew he’d probably taken off a dead man.  Kurloz’s hair was tangled and there was a smear of dirt on his cheek.  He held himself like a prince, meant for lofty spires and shameless, winding catacombs.      

“I missed you,” Kurloz said, and Mituna realized he had forgotten how deep and cold his voice was.  It was the perfect kind of voice for music, but he had never heard Kurloz sing.  “Are you hoping to capture me?”

Mituna shifted on the fencepost, feeling himself sway closer to the thorns.  Away from Kurloz, even though he’d been looking for him.  It was a primal reaction, not something he’d really intended at all.  “We have to talk, now,” he said, as if he were in control.

“I never meant to break you,” said Kurloz, and Mituna thought of a child with a toy, frowning down at something splintered in his hands and not much fun, anymore.  Maybe Kurloz noticed the grossed-out twist of his eyebrows, then, or the sneer just starting to form around his crooked teeth, because he corrected himself.  “ _I never meant to lose you_ , Mituna.” 

Maybe that was better?

Mituna reminded Kurloz that he would have run out of blood and flickered out like a light soon, anyway, and then Kurloz’s hunger wouldn’t have been his problem, anymore.  And Kurloz nodded without saying a word.

Mituna told him he hadn’t known what to feel when he found out the vampire who’d drained him was any sort of alive, but he hadn’t been angry about that part.  And Kurloz smiled a little wider than usual, showing a few of his pale bright teeth.  The scars from where his lips had been sewn shut bunched up strangely, when he smiled like that.   

Mituna said that after learning more about the undead – after meeting Gamzee, really, though he didn’t spell it out so clearly – it felt like maybe they could understand each other.

Maybe they could be frank with each other, finally, and Kurloz could tell Mituna what he truly wanted.  They could even fight, there, on some spindly street in a town no one had heard of.  If it came to that.  Mituna could hold a little lightning in his hands, and he felt it crackling just behind his eyelids even then.  But that wasn’t what Mituna wanted.  Kurloz said he was brave, challenging a monster to a duel while balanced precariously up above some stranger’s yard.

“Well, yeah,” said Mituna, as though whether or not he was brave had never been in question.

They _could_ fight, but they could also confess.  Mituna said what he wanted, then.  He said it in a scratchy voice, with a sarcastic tilt that was as good as a shield.

He wanted to lead Kurloz by the rigid corpse-hand back to the inn where he was staying and sit him down on one of the creaky beds.  He wanted to clean the dirt off his face and get him back into clothes that were his, not stolen from someone he had probably killed.  He wanted to work out a plan –with the Pyrope sisters, honestly, but don’t freak the fuck out or anything – where Kurloz could be saved.  Where they could try again.  Game over, right?  So you just dealt a new hand.  If Kurloz hadn’t meant to break him – to _lose_ him – maybe there was a different way to do this.  

It had always been hard for Mituna to give up on anything.  

Kurloz held out his arms, then, wide like the angel wings on one of those cemetery statues, and Mituna didn’t hesitate long enough before he pushed himself off the fencepost and down into the cold, waiting heaviness of his grip. 

At first, he thought he was getting just what he’d asked for.  He could feel Kurloz’s bones, and the vast emptiness where his heartbeat should have been.  He remembered the riddles Kurloz liked to tell, and how proud of himself he’d looked while reciting them.  He remembered all the times Kurloz had just smiled and shaken his head after losing card games.  It felt a little like going home might have, for just a moment or two.

And then Kurloz’s face peeled back and his fangs were raw and huge and digging deeper into Mituna’s neck than he’d ever let them, before.  It felt like everything in him was rushing out all at once, like soon he’d be splattered across the whole street, his skin catching the wind like empty cloth.  He tried to scream a spell for lightning, but it came out mangled.  It was pain all through him, then, shuddering his empty veins, sending sparks burning across his cheeks instead of crying.  That would scar, Mituna knew.  That would scar for sure.

Kurloz held him tighter, even as his screaming turned to hisses, to gasps and then nothing at all.

Mituna couldn’t think.  He couldn’t breathe, or reach for the spell book and holy water vials in his bag.  He felt Kurloz lower him down, tenderly, onto the road, and he heard neighbors bustling around far away and laughing about somebody setting off fireworks like some kind of dumbass. 

Everything went from raw hurt to stillness, like a fire snuffed out.  There was a void, then, where Mituna could almost remember so many things but carried nothing back with him...  Orpheus returning from the underworld without Eurydice, Kurloz might have said, like he thought it was funny.

And then Mituna tasted blood that wasn’t human, anymore.  It was sharp and salty-sweet, like his own blood, sure, but something about it was wrong. 

It wasn’t until Mituna tilted forward, a rigor mortis spasm of waking, that he realized the blood was cold, and pooled in Kurloz’s palm.  It was clotted, and smoother than smooth, and when Mituna met Kurloz’s eyes he saw nothing but swaying, velvety love inside them. 

What they’d had before wasn’t working.  Mituna had been fragile, and Kurloz had been hungry, but now? 

Now, Kurloz told him everything was going to be alright.


End file.
